Visconti faces

The Damned (1969), Luchino Visconti

Visconti summer

Ingrid Thulin in The Damned (1969), Luchino Visconti

Charlotte Rampling in The Damned (1969), Luchino Visconti

Princess Mononoke (1997), Hayao Miyazaki

Princess Mononoke (1997), Hayao Miyazaki

Princess Mononoke (1997), Hayao Miyazaki

Princess Mononoke (1997), Hayao Miyazaki

I: What was it that moved you? - A: When I was seven, a member of my family, a person I loved, died in front of me. Suddenly her body was a thing without a voice. Listening to Blok’s poem—I was thirteen or fourteen—I thought that perhaps poetry could create a relationship with absence, with death, transposing the present into another space and time. I: Does this relationship with absence remain the reason why you write poems? - A:I write to intensify reality and at the same time to undermine it, as Emily Dickinson does when she says, “Bring me the sunset in a cup / Reckon the morning’s flagons up.” The miracle of this poem is the dislocation of the relationship between the domestic and the universal. The visible is there, but reimagined by the swerve from ordinary perspectives and scales. Antonella Anedda, The Art of Poetry No. 109 Interviewed by Susan Stewart

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